Primary andrewhimes.net

January 2011

This morning I find myself glued to the radio listening to ongoing coverage of what appears to be a powerful democratic revolution being waged by hundreds of thousands of unarmed protesters on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, and other major cities.

An eloquent and thoughtful discourse from Jon Stewart at the beginning of The Daily Show on Monday. I really loved hearing from Jon that it was possible to call for respect and wisdom from all of us who live in this democracy and share responsibility for the tone of our dialogue -- without needing to blame anybody other than the shooter -- for last week's murderous rampage in Arizona. Sometimes crazy people do crazy things, and you just don't know what might have set someone off.

(Excerpt from Chapter 27 of The Sword of the Lord.) A century ago, in some sense the original Christian fundamentalists were asking a fundamental question. The core impulse that gave rise to fundamentalism was a healthy one: rediscover and cherish the essence of Christianity. In 1909, A. C. Dixon and R. A.

Margaret Wheatley, the amazing woman who started a revolution in organizational development in 1992 with her book Leadership and the New Science, has a new book out that I've been reading with much pleasure since a friend gave it to me as a Christmas present.

One of the most important books I read this year was by Peggy Holman: Engaging Emergence; Turning Upheaval into Opportunity. As Peggy says in her blog, emergence is a process "through which order arises from chaos as the existing order is disrupted, differences appear, and a new coherence coalesces.

Introduction to The Sword of the Lord

"Christian fundamentalism in America emerged a century ago, the faith of generations of immigrants who had experienced war and revolution, removal and upheaval, and in response to the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Cameron Penny's poem

If you are lucky in this life,A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies.And when the soldiers look into the windowThey don’t see their enemies.They see themselves as children.And they stop fightingAnd go home and go to sleep. When they wake up, the land is well again.

Cameron Penny's If You Are Lucky in This Life was originally published in the November/December 2001 issue of North American Review. Marie Howe reads his poem in the film Voices in Wartime.